Christ The Reconciler
CHRIST THE RECONCILER
COLOSSIANS 1:21-23
Do you believe Christ can meet the separated and lonely parts of your personality, and link them with a holy God in joyful reconciliation?
Paul has just affirmed that Jesus Christ is the agent of God’s magnificent work of creation. The orders of angels of which the false teachers spoke—thrones, dominions, principalities, authorities—owed their existence to him (1:16). As the keystone to all created existence, Christ alone prevents the return of all things to a state of chaos (1:17). The apostle then directed the gaze of his readers to a moment beyond time when Christ will have achieved the reconciliation of all things to himself (1:20). But Paul does not allow his readers to become lost in the depths of reflection. He points them concretely to Golgotha and the shed blood of Jesus, the Lord of life. Nothing less than this is the cost of the reconciliation he has achieved.
In the verses which immediately follow, Paul moves from the language of worship to the worshiping community itself (1:21f.). The cosmic achievement of Christ found its practical outworking in the Lycus Valley in the reconciliation of the Colossians. The object of Christ’s reconciling action “on earth” (1:20) were people who knew in themselves a profound sense of separation from God and from one another (1:21). Their evil deeds merely intensified the hostility they expressed through their style of life. Modern existential humanity feels penetrated by Paul’s language precisely because this is their experience. The violence of the language which follows, locating the moment and point of reconciliation in “his body of flesh by his death” (1:22), is calculated to point beyond doctrine to the reality of death on the cross (1:20).
The purpose of Christ’s reconciling action is to achieve a new creation (see 3:10), in which people who once were “separated” may know the bold approach to God of those who are “holy”; those who were “hostile in mind” may know in their relationships to others a blamelessness, and those who practiced “evil deeds” may be scrutinized by God and people and pronounced “irreproachable.” All of this, Paul affirms, Christ will achieve. But it is the responsibility of the Colossians to be rooted in faith, not shifting from that hope of the gospel for which Paul had thanked God (1:3,5) to some lesser hope offered by local teachers (1:23).